If you are running a website and working hard to enhance its web presence and to help maintain a good status of the flow of traffic, then you ought to work out on several aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Though you can do most of the optimization stuff manually, it will be good if you use a better tool to help manage it. And if you are very much interested in optimizing your site for Google search engine, then Google has a well developed tool for it. And that is the “Google Webmaster Tools”
Who is Webmaster?
Webmaster is a person who manages the server configurations, administrates, tweak, maintain and authors the website etc. In most of the cases, a webmaster is someone one owns a website and does all the above mentioned jobs. However, big websites and companies hire webmasters to do those jobs.
What is Google Webmaster Tools?
The Google Webmaster Tools is a free online service offered by Google. This tool concentrates on how a Webmaster can manage the visibility of his/her website on the search results of Google. It is also used to help tweak the website for better crawling performance and thus to help keep the good status of the website. Though this tool is made only for Google search results, it helps tweak the website for better performance on other search engines in some way or the other. You will know how and why later in this post.
What all can Google Webmaster Tools let its user do?
Check the status of Crawl Rate and tweak it.
Using this, a webmaster can check the speed at which the Googlebot is crawling the website. And with the help of some tools, the webmaster can set the Crawl Rate of the website. Increasing the crawl rate will increase the rate of requests done by the googlebot during the process of crawling the pages on the website. The faster the crawl rate is, the faster your contents get crawled. However, Google doesn’t recommend you to set higher crawl rate unless you have issues with traffic.
See the list of Internal and External pages to the website.
This tool helps a webmaster to see how many links are pointing towardsthe website from other websites (External) and how many pages are being linked within the website (Internal). Google Webmaster Tools lets to see a whole lot of details in this stuff. A webmaster can see the number of non-existing (404) pages being linked to your website from other sites and also to see the anchor text of the link and more.
Keep an eye on Keywords.
This tool also helps a webmaster to have a look at the most crawled Keywords by Google on the website. One can analyze this and use the keywords in the META tag of the pages to help get better search results. Do remember that the list contains the keywords that are present in your website content and not the keywords which drive traffic to your website. There is another option which lets your see which keywords are driving traffic as well.
View the statistics about the performance of Google Indexes of the website.
This will help a webmaster to see and analyze how a website is being indexed on Google search engine.
Submit and manage Sitemap to Google.
A webmaster can use this tool to submit the Sitemap of the website. This is useful when you make changes on the base architecture and link structure in your website. This helps Google to discover the pages which it might not otherwise.
Manage Sitelinks.
Sitelinks are the links to the internal pages of a website. These links appear below in a snippet on the search result page. This appears mostly on top of all results and when the exact phrase, word or keyword is being used to search which is very closely related to the website.
Not all the websites have Sitelinks. Google will automatically generate this as the site gets more attention. This tool can only be used to remove the links if you don’t like any.
Generate and manage a robot.txt file.
A robot.txt file is a file used to configure how a web spider or a crawler bot should access your website content. You can limit a web spider to crawl only preferred pages or categories of your website. This can be used for privacy purpose and to disable all your content from being crawled. Without doing this, your content will be publicly viewable for all the web spiders. If your website doesn’t have a robot.txt, then you can use this tool to create one.
Change the address of your website.
If you are thinking of moving your website to a new domain with the existing content, you can use this tool to let Google know that you have moved on to a new domain and submit the new URL and redirect the web spider to crawl the content on your new URL. This will help make Google to update the index of your website and enabled faster and smoother transition from old domain to the new one.
This ends the brief introduction of the Google Webmaster Tools. I will write on how to use several features listed in this post and others in upcoming days. So stay tuned.
